On 17 January, five days after the earthquake in Haiti that killed a quarter of a million people and left even more injured, a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince by US military commanders at Toussaint L'Ouverture Airport. A press release issued by the humanitarian aid organization did not change the situation but a 140-character message on Twitter did. US TV journalist Ann Curry, who was in Haiti at the time, used Twitter, a free microblogging service that changes the way individuals and companies share and get their information, to write a curt message: "To the US military running Haiti's airport, find a way to let the doctors without borders plane land." Curry's message was spotted a moment later by Jeff Pulver, a technology entrepreneur credited with a pioneering voice over Internet protocol technology, who happened to be sitting in front of his computer screen at his home in New Jersey. Pulver, a social networking enthusiast who has some 360,000 followers on Twitter, "re-tweeted" Curry's message. Within moments Pulver and others who relayed Curry's message, got a direct response from the US military via Twitter saying "we are on it." In addition, Curry shared Medecins Sans Frontières tweet with her contacts in the military. As a result of Curry's efforts and the attention from Twitter users from around the world, the situation received significant attention and the plane was allowed to land a short time later. This, and hundreds of other stories like it, underscores the outsized impact on society of tech companies like Twitter, a 2010 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Twitter allows dissidents to raise their voices in countries ruled by dictators, charities to raise money and awareness around the globe. "For the first time in the history of the world we are all listening on the same frequency," says Pulver, who is writing a book about the impact of Twitter on society. "Through this backchannel people are discovering they have a voice and can affect change." Like Twitter, a growing number of Technology Pioneers are using technology to empower individuals, transforming society in the process. To be sure, politicians are using social media to win elections and to try to maintain their grip on power. President Barack Obama famously employed about 100 people to work on New Media during his campaign for the US presidency. Obama used social networks like Facebook to mobilize millions of volunteers from across the country to raise money and campaign on his behalf. Sebastián Piñera, the newly elected President of Chile, has jumped on the bandwagon, asking all cabinet members to start tweeting. And, more than 500 Japanese and German politicians are now using the social networking service in their respective countries, according to press reports. The rise of social networking has turned the tables: it is now much more about bottom up activity rather than top down. As more and more people migrate to social networking - it is now the most popular online activity U power is migrating to non-governmental actors, who can leverage technology to easily organize into effective decentralized networks. "Twitter is just one example of how, thanks to technology, the power is moving to the periphery," says Steve Prentice, Vice-President and Fellow at technology consultancy Gartner, which specializes in looking at the intersection of technology, business and society download
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